After the Land of the Living
by Kudzu1
Summary: An old ARC trooper, now retired, lays dying in a hospital and wonders what it takes to live.


After the Land of the Living  
By Kudzu

"_Far below, we leave forever  
__Dreams of what we were..."  
_Johnny Clegg, "Scatterlings of Africa"

"I'm lost now," the old man admitted, closing his eyes for just a second as he reclined into his hospital bed. He opened them again and regarded his visitor directly. "I've been lost before. I was lost when they put us into stasis."

"They didn't need Advance Recon Commandos to trouble them," his visitor, a man looking not much younger, nodded assent.

"They weren't ready for the storm." The retired clone trooper smiled faintly, then went on, "I was lost again when they thawed us out, we fought and a couple of us died at the First Battle of Kamino, and then they told us that a Jedi Master had killed Jango Fett."

"He was on the wrong side of the war," the visitor shrugged back. "The Republic could have used him, but he got bought. He never wanted his clones to be purchased like that, so he died a hypocrite."

"Jango was such an enigma," the old clone murmured. "He died in such a meaningless way for such a meaningless cause. His inferior duplicates had better deaths. More glory. But I have even less than he."

"Don't talk like that," the other man cut him off harshly. "Old age catches us all. Nobody can outrun it."

He snorted, then took in a deep breath and exhaled it before saying, "The Emperor seems to do a fine job of never dying, despite him looking like he's five hundred years old and growth-accelerated."

"The Jedi -"

"Maybe," came the cynical interruption. "Another time I felt lost. I never liked the Jedi. I never liked taking orders passed down from the same Mace Windu who killed Jango. They weren't like the clones, and weren't like me. But I can't reconcile the image that the Emperor painted of them being murderous assassins with my own memories."

The other man shook his head, a twisted smile on his lips. "It is a surprise to me that we have never known anything about one another and yet I'm here at your bedside at the end of all things."

"The first generation is dying," he whispered, settling a little deeper into his thin mattress. "What's left of the second generation will follow; it will take maybe a month before it begins."

"The Kaminoans never built clones to really live."

He muttered agreement and said, "Short and glorious lives. I don't know what glory is supposed to be, though."

"I told you not to talk like that," snapped the visitor. "You were never _killed_. That's all there is to it."

"I sometimes wish I had been. I wish I hadn't heard that voice from the helmet comm. 'Execute Order Sixty-Six.'" His eyelids again fell, then lifted. "I didn't have to think. I did what I'd been told, and I shot and killed Commander Jules Lafayette. Nine bolts, looking straight into his eyes, nine bolts into the chest, I fired. Killed a boy; he couldn't have been much older than sixteen."

"That's the way it works," said his visitor. "You take an order, you carry it out. You pull the trigger regardless of what the person on the other end of your gun looks like when they tell you to pull the trigger."

"I watched neutron bombs fall on a nonviolent world," he said in an almost strangled voice. "I aimed the jet of my flamethrower into a crowd of university students and listened to their screaming and smelled their burning hair and flesh. I put vibroblades through maybe two dozen backs of people who'd never done so much as killed."

"We all did," the man said sternly. "My life and your life."

"And the Empire is master, then and now and it will always be," bitterly retorted he.

The other clone folded his arms. "Empires rise and empires fall. Nothing lives forever."

"Mortality." The word was spoken with a long sigh through it. "Do you suppose all people are raised from babies told that they could die at any moment?"

He considered, then decided aloud, "No. They're let to live long lives, full of happiness, and lives that no one will speak of four generations later."

"While ours are forgotten flashes of 'glory', aye," whispered the old Advance Recon Commando in his bed.

"Born to die. Live to serve." It was a familiar, ironic mantra. And it was made all the colder in this bleak hospital setting.

"We never lived like men," he said simply in reply. He indicated his lower abdomen with a frail sweep of his arm. "Now accelerated aging's taking my liver and kidneys, and it's taking a good swipe at my pancreas too while it's at it."

The standing one looked down at his feet briefly before saying, "We were never supposed to live like men. We were made to serve a purpose, fill a role."

"We knew it all along, didn't we?"

"I wonder if that's made the road all the more painful to walk down," he murmured.

"I can't be proud of what I am or was anymore," the clone in the bed said weakly. "The GAR was always just made to be cannon fodder, and we were the cannon fodder elite."

"We died so that others might live," the other said. "Remember that."

"Others who turned on their people and their galaxy," he returned scathingly. "Others who used us to kill their own guardians of peace and justice, used us as the strong arm of people like Vader who millions like us died to destroy the likes of. Vader is no better than was Count Dooku."

"Words like that can get you -" he began a warning, then stopped and shrugged. "What are the consequences of words when nothing is left that can hurt you?"

"And in the end…" the old man sighed. "I had a name once before the Empire. I punished myself. I took it away from me."

The other aged clone leaned in. "Who were you?"

The significance of the phrasing could not be lost on him, and he smiled humorlessly. Who had he been indeed if he didn't deserve to be anybody now? "My name was Savuka. My number is Alpha-Ninety-Four."

There was a silence. "Take the name back, my brother," urged the Clone Wars veteran at last, his voice soft, "and leave the number behind you."

"Who am I?" he asked quietly. A tear welled in the corner of one eye. He was on his deathbed now, and he was lost. Life had once had a single primary objective and a few secondary objectives, could once be explained to him with a glance down at his datapad. Two grated-out words and a spoken number had made it a sick parody of what it once was. The grey-shaded grimness of the war between necessity and morality had become a one-sided battle that morality always lost. He'd been phased out, pressed into retirement, and quiet disillusionment had simmered, rising to a boil up until this day (maybe his last; maybe he had weeks left to spend staring up at the spartan ceiling).

"You are what you are, and I am what I am. We have all learned to question."

"We were always trained to put aside pain," he whispered, voice low but guttural.

"Jango Fett told us to put aside pain," the other former Advance Recon Commando amended, "and that training served us well. But he died uselessly. No blaze of glory for Jango. He was decapitated with one good swing of a violet lightsaber."

He nestled a scarred cheek into his pillow. "No blazes of glory for these two old soldiers either, truth."

"You said yourself that you didn't know what glory was supposed to be. You will die, probably soon, and it will be a quiet and swiftly forgotten passing that no one will mourn. You know this."

"Yes."

"You accept this."

"I do."

"Would you rather die holding the power-lash that tore strips from a Wookiee's back in your hand? Or holding the detonator to a dozen bombs planted in a town marketplace?"

"No," he replied after a hesitant pause.

"Even if you died fighting off half a dozen enraged Wookiee warriors or a platoon of converted battle droids? A 'glorious' death?"

Silence again. Then, finally, "That's not glory."

"It's death in battle," he reminded him.

"Glory isn't enslavement. It isn't terrorism."

He nodded. "The Empire is a corruption of the Republic that has been our life since our birthing. It's cruel and it's not worth defending any longer." He hesitated, but went on to say, "And, my brother, I would rather die quietly out of its service than 'gloriously' for it."

"Not worth dying for…"

"You know this," he said again.

And he received the same answer. "Yes."

"And you are worthy of having a name. You question. You accept. You aren't just a soldier any longer."

"You look like all the rest," he murmured. "Which one are you?"

The clone smiled, at last a full-hearted and happy expression. "My name is Asudela. You knew me as Alpha Seventy-Five. I killed Coleman Kcaj on Hypori."

"I had heard that you never took a name!"

He shook his head. "The ARC trooper I was never took a name," he corrected. "We are much alike, I think. I've come very far to now recognize that day I destroyed my Jedi General as the beginning of a time of darkness, my brother. As have you."

"And so you named yourself?"

"I became myself. I broke my own arm on Boraeon when I realized that I couldn't be Alpha Seventy-Five any longer. As I intended, they decided they'd rather retire a biologically sixty-something clone than go through the bother of making it priority to get it mended up or replace the arm." He moved his right shoulder to indicate which limb it was. "So I went into a civilian hospital, just like this one, to get the break repaired and went into my reflective retirement." He gave a bitter but undiscouraged laugh. "I could not serve the Empire anymore and still uphold the person I had been. I recognize now that my following of Order Sixty-Six was a mistake."

"We are alike indeed," he said sadly.

"We are enlightened, in a sense," said the man, once A-75, who now called himself Asudela, spreading his slender old arms. "We understand the good from the evil and the countless shades of grey between them. We've transcended our old mission. Killing machines aren't supposed to have to think."

He rested feeble hands on the hem of his bedsheets and slowly, the edges of his mouth turned up. "And life has gone beyond the datapad."

"Isn't it too ironic," Asudela remarked, "that only in the end do we finally understand this?"

"Far too ironic," he agreed.

"There is redemption in thinking for one's own self," the proud ex-trooper said. "You can't bring back the innocent or undeserving lives you took, or rescind the fear you brought, or take down the regime that destroyed what the Grand Army once stood for."

"Not afraid to speak your mind aloud either, now?" the dying clone whispered with a wink.

He grinned cannily. "You were right. There's nothing anyone can do to punish me when I'm this old and just aging faster each second."

"Aye," he said.

Asudela became more serious again and he spoke: "You regret the things you've done, every atrocity you've committed in the Empire's name, and you wouldn't do them over again for anybody's sake?"

"Never again," he confirmed reluctantly.

"You don't want to believe in redemption, I don't think," Asudela chuckled quietly. "Neither did I."

"How can it be possible?" he exclaimed, trying in vain to sit up in bed. "Brother -"

He silenced him with a finger, leaned close to his ear, and whispered, "Because salvation does exist. It is apology."

"'Sorry' rights no wrongs," he replied, sinking back into the bed. A tear, perhaps of despair, spilled down his cheek as it had been threatening to do for several minutes.

"It doesn't right them. Nothing can justify anything that really is wrong. But you've learned to be a critic. You've learned to see with the eyes of a man and not a clone. You've found redemption at last, my brother…Savuka."

"Savuka," he breathed. Even as he lay in bed, a new regal bearing seemed to fall across him, a new pride through his veins, and a clarity sang through his mind as he retook the title like a crown. "I am…"

"Dignity is more important than power or glory," Asudela said into his ear.

The time had come. Savuka, once A-94, lost and now found again in the final hour, looked upon the faint outline of a glimmering doorway. There was hope. There was redemption.

"Easy as that?" he managed to ask, a smile on his lips though he knew that life was slowly leaving his aged body.

He replied with a wink, and said mysteriously, "Only if you are strong."

"Well," Savuka whispered, "I never thought I'd be happy to die when I wasn't on duty." And with those words, his eyes closed once more, but they would not again open.

Asudela reached out and curled the still-warm fingers of his right hand into a fist and placed the hand into his cupped left, then rested them on his chest. It was a Mirshaf gesture of triumph, and it was more appropriate than anyone else could understand. "Rest in peace, son of Mandalore," he whispered, dropping to a knee.

He rose and exited in silence, knowing that soon it would be he to pass into the nether, and unafraid to face whatever could come after the land of the living.


End file.
